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Big pumpkin season review

Well that’s another year of big pumpkins over and, it is fair to say, Halloween gets bigger every year. The professional carvers took more than ever of our large pumpkins but the giant pumpkins remain in a very niche market. I think how difficult they are to handle is one reason but the other is that most giant pumpkins are not what people recognise as a pumpkin; the heaviest are all big flat and white/grey or at best yellow. I have been trying to select and breed giant pumpkin seed to retain the (pallet) size but round and orange and this year that came good.

The challenge is big, round and orange – we are slowly getting there!

By chance, I grew enough seed pumpkins on the same cross breeding as this beauty for ‘Mark’s big orange giant pumpkin seed’ to be made available for sale for the first time. Sales have been steady but encouraging; there are obviously more people out there wanting to grow such a pumpkin than I thought!

We still did a more conventional giant (a ‘just in case’ backup) and, after it had been through makeup, you might have seen it on the Halloween episode of ITV’s Loose Women.

It was a very good size (it would have won at Malvern) and shape but, for me, lacks the colour for a good display pumpkin.

The other noticeable development this season was the exponential demand for ‘Pumpkin Picking’ where children get all togged up and select their pumpkin directly from a field. The weather was dreadful yet the demand remained constant; pumpkin picking is now most definitely on the calendar as a must do family activity when you have kids of a certain age. It is a high volume business with bigger infrastructure requirements than you would imagine so whilst we could make more of this, with Windmill Animal Farm only down the road who are geared up to offer a great pumpkin picking experience and much more, we point our pumpkin picking customers towards them whilst we stick to our specialist giant pumpkins, large carving pumpkins and heritage eating pumpkins for the foreseeable but I have a feeling we may need to review this. Selecting a pumpkin from the yard may not be enough!